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Jim
Brown's Longest Yard: The Fight to Save Stan Tookie Williams
by DAVE ZIRIN
"Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things,
and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the
meanest on earth. . . . While there is a lower class, I am in
it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free." --
Eugene V. Debs
These words of the fabled social activist also define the life
of NFL hall of famer and actor Jim Brown. He has mediated truces
between the toughest gangs in Los Angeles and fought racism from
South Central to Soweto. But today he is involved in a different
kind of fight: the race to save Stan Tookie Williams, who now awaits execution on
California's death row. Williams is due to be executed December
13, and Brown has linked arms with a motley crew of activists
from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg
demanding that Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger spare his life.
Schwarzenegger, who has set a clemency hearing for December 8,
recently told reporters he is "dreading" the decision
he is about to make.
Source:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/zirin
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Responses
Rudy,
I hope you'll submit your piece on swimming to the southern
anthology. (The deadline for submissions is January 2, 2006).
—Jeannette
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I like this one too, even though I haven't
jumped on the Tookie bandwagon. There are hundreds of thousands of
black men in prison more deserving of a movement. I get a letter
at least once a month from them. Like Cicely Tyson's cousin,
Brian, who got life for killing a drug dealer on his block who was
in bed with the Philly cops. The FBI knew about it too, but
wouldn't help at his trial. in fact, the judge tried to put a
black paper trying to publicize his case out of business by fining
it an unheard of $1000 a minute for contempt of court. From Legal
Watch
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On Sept. 23, 1997, Brian
Tyson shot and killed Damon Millner in Feltonville, Pa.
Later that night, Tyson was arrested and charged with
first-degree murder.
Tyson confessed to killing Millner but said that he
had acted in self-defense. According to Tyson, Millner was
a drug dealer who, together with other drug dealers, had
been out to get him.
Before his trial was scheduled to begin, Tyson gave
interviews to Reporters Mark Bowden of the Philadelphia
Inquirer and Linn Washington Jr., of the Philadelphia
Tribune. Based on the interviews, both newspapers
published a series of articles about the case. They
reported that, according to Tyson, he had been involved in
a long-running feud with local drug dealers and had been
active in trying to rid his neighborhood of drugs before
the shooting.
Pennsylvania officials read the articles and
noticed inconsistencies in Tyson's story. They believed
that the articles suggested that Tyson may have shot
Millner for reasons other than self-defense. Accordingly,
the commonwealth subpoenaed Bowden and Washington to
testify at Tyson's trial regarding unpublished statements
he had made during the interviews. The state also issued a
subpoena requiring the reporters to turn over their
interview notes.
Bowden and Washington moved to quash the subpoenas.
The trial court granted the motion in part, holding that
they were not required to turn over their notes.
Nevertheless, the court ordered the reporters to produce
– either orally or in writing – any statements made by
Tyson about the shooting and his relationship to local
drug dealers.
The reporters refused to produce Tyson's
statements.
On Dec. 13, 2000, the trial court held Bowden and
Washington in contempt and ordered each of them to pay
$100 for every minute that they refused to comply. |
I wrote about this brother and spoke to a
producer at 60 Minutes about doing a story on him, but to no
avail. He is obviously innocent. A reporter from the Philly
Inquirer contacted me on the Q-T to let me know that the FBI
wiretaps which brought down some folks in the Philly's Mayor's
office revealed that the cops were on the take from the drug
cartel which had firebombed Brian Tyson's car, shot at him and his
family at whim until he finally went and bought a gun.
Before that, Brian wrote letters of complaint
to the Mayor, the Police Commissioner, and others. He had gone to
the Million Man March in 1995 and was inspired by the experience
to confront the drug dealers on his block. His story is just the
tip of the iceberg of stories I've heard, because I'm a
progressive attorney. Brian was a college grad who had never been
arrested before.
—Peace out, Kam
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Kam,
I agree with you that
it's a very fine poem, but I can't tell what side of the issue
Rudy comes up on. Like you, I can't get on the Tookie
bandwagon. I heard him interviewed by Tavis Smiley, and the
man came through as insincere, duplicitous, and cagey as hell.
He didn't answer a single question straight up. I'd rather
devote my emotional energy to some of those young Black men who've
been sent up for possessing a little weed. I just returned
from viewing Capote, which is a powerful study of desire,
violence, self-destructiveness, and manipulation. The heavy
silences and the shots of that empty, bleak Kansas landscape and
of the massive stone prison are awesome.
—Miriam
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I'm writing a poem, only. I know nothing of
Tookie. The Tookie in the poem is a type, whatever the Tookie of
real life is. I only came to know this man in California within
the last several days, with many pleading for his life. I'm often
behind the curve in these matters. Such life and death issues are
dreadful. I wish no man killed—past, present, or future. Murder
is cruel whatever its justification. The poem is about the
struggle to be, using your swimming metaphor, and redemption,
if such a thing be. But it's mostly about the general fabric of
cruelty in America.
—Rudy
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* * * * Hi Rudy: Yes, we are all "strolling
prison corridors," dressed in orange jump suits, overcrowded,
with poor food, poor health & mental health care, abuse &
racism, violence & despair. Prison in America is
barbaric, and the death penalty is without question the lowest
depth of that barbarism.
One of the blogs I follow is worth drawing
attention to in regards to your fine poem, "For Stan
Tookie Williams" The
Real Cost of Prison Weblog
http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/
in particular this entry posted December 1, 2005
More Young Black Men Have Done Prison Time
Than Military Service or Earned a College Degree
http://realcostofprisons.org/blog/archives/2005/12/more_young_blac.html#more
May. 20, 2004 | Social Science | Law and
Policy
More young black men have done prison time than military service
or earned college degree, study shows
CONTACT: Joel Schwarz
joels@u.washington.edu
206-543-2580
Being jailed in federal or state prisons has
become so common today that more young black men in the United
States have done time than have served in the military or earned a
college degree, according to a new study.
The paper, appearing this week in the American
Sociological Review, estimates that 20 percent of all black
men born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in prison by the
time they reached their early 30s. By comparison, less than 3
percent of white males born in the same time period had been in
prison.
Equally startling, the risks of prison
incarceration rose steeply with lower levels of education. Among
blacks, 30.2 percent of those who didn't attend college had gone
to prison by 1999 and 58.9 percent of black high school dropouts
born from 1965 through 1969 had served time in state or federal
prison by their early 30s.
"More strikingly than patterns of military
enlistment, marriage or college graduation, prison time
differentiates the young adulthood of black men from the life
course of white males. Imprisonment is now a common life event for
an entire demographic group," said Becky Pettit, one of the
study's authors and a University of Washington assistant professor
of sociology. Bruce Western, a Princeton University professor of
sociology, is the co-author.
The study looks at men born from 1945 through
1969 focusing on two groups -- those born from 1945 through 1949
and those born from 1965 through 1969. It draws on publicly
available data on inmates in federal and state prisons from the
federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, but does not include
information on spending time in local jails, which hold an
estimated one-third of the incarcerated prison population.
Hispanics were not included because data was not available,
particularly about men born in the 1940s.
The incarceration rate for black men born in
1945-49 was 10.6 percent by the time they were in their early 30s,
but increased to 20.5 percent for those born in 1965-69. Among
white men the overall risk of imprisonment grew from 1.4 percent
to 2.9 percent over the same time period.
The increase in incarceration marked a dramatic
shift in the life course for young black males. In addition to
estimating the risk of incarceration for birth cohorts by race and
education, the researchers compared the prevalence of spending
time in prison to other important life events for men born in
1965-69 who survived until 1999. Pettit and Western found that
22.4 percent of surviving black men born in that period had spent
time in jail, while just 17.4 percent had served in the military
and only 12.5 percent had earned a bachelor's degree.
By the end of 1999, 1.3 million men were in
federal or state prisons. The researchers said that changes in
penal policy through the 1970s and '80s, including custodial
sentences for drug offenses and mandatory minimum sentences,
helped fuel the expansion of the penal system and has led to
growing disparities in the risk of incarceration by education.
"Prison is no longer just for the most
violent or incorrigible offenders. Inmates are increasingly likely
to be serving time for drug offenses or property crimes,"
Pettit said. "While there is enduring racial
disproportionality in imprisonment, we find that the lifetime risk
of incarceration is increasingly stratified by education. Over the
past 30 years the risk of incarceration has grown for both blacks
and whites, but has grown the fastest among men who have a high
school diploma or less."
"This has become increasingly important
because we know ex-prisoners face a variety of challenges after
incarceration," said Western. "These range from employer
discrimination in the job market to increased risks of divorce and
separation in family life. The experience of imprisonment in
America has emerged as a key social division marking a new pattern
in the lives of recent birth cohorts of black men."
The research was supported in part by the
National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation.
The other blog I follow, the flip side of this
issue, is, without doubt, run by a bodhisattva, an
enlightened being: LA's Homeless Blog
http://www.epath.org/blog/index.htm
And what else is a mother to do, but shed
tears, read blogs?
—Jane
The Justice
Policy Institute reported in 2002 that there were 791,649 Black men of all
ages in jail or prison compared to 603,000 in higher education.
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For
Tookie
posted 5 December 2005
/ updated 19 October 2007 |
